WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist; in such a world a non-revolutionary pacifist is a contradiction in terms, a monstrosity.*
A.J. Muste was referred to throughout the world as the “American Gandhi,” and he’s probably best known, if at all, for his leadership of the peace movement in the postwar era.
But he was also one of the most influential of labor organizers of the early 20th century.
Our GUEST for this hour is Leilah Danielson, author of American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century. Danielson is a professor of History at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and she joined us by telephone from her office.
A. J. Muste was a pacifist preacher who lost his pulpit during World War I; an organizer of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers strike of 1919; a pioneering labor educator at Brookwood Labor College; and the founder of the American Workers Party, which sought to create a Marxist-Leninist movement as militant as the Communists yet thoroughly American in its culture. After turning back to Christian pacifism in 1936, Muste became the beloved elder statesman of American pacifism, mentoring leaders of the civil rights movement and the New Left.
We find Muste at the center of most of the “radical” actions and social movements in US History in the first half of the 20th century; and it’s because of this that he offers us an opportunity to reflect upon the pertinent activist question: “what is to be done?” Surely a question many of us are asking today.
Tragedy is piled on tragedy for our country and for the world because the progressives, liberals, unions, and farm organizations, which ought to be flatly opposed to the nation’s war-course, are so uncritically anti-Russian…and so ignorant of how really to overcome communism that they support the war policy…these forces line up with the Right, with reaction, with violence, though they do not man to do that and try to make themselves believe that they do not.**
MUSIC
Ernie Lieberman, Goodbye, Mr. War (1955) – Special thanks to Robbie Lieberman for providing the music.
“Spring Song”
“Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier”
“Strangest Dream”
“Quilting Bee”
“Study War No More”
* “Pacifism and Class War,” The World Tomorrow (September, 1928)
**”A Vote for Wallace Will Be–A Vote for the Communists,” Fellowship, XIV (July, 1948).
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Studio Engineer: Wes Martin
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
